On Variants of Genericity

We discuss some general styles of human thinking which could be useful at the design stage of a software project. The central idea of genericity (as viewed by us) is to reduce redundancy in a software structure. This leads not only to better software structures, but also improves economy (by consuming less human resources). Reduction of redundancy should start in early phases of the development process, in particular in the design stage. Our concepts have proven valuable for a novel operating system design. We draw some important conclusions: universal genericity and compositorical genericity are regarded as superior to extensional genericity in many cases. Since OO inheritance is a subcase of the latter, we regard it as an optional subordinated concept. We show that the first two concepts can simulate functional programming (FP) and aspect-oriented programming (AOP), among others.